Sociology
COVID-19 exposed longstanding neglect in UK social care. This neglect cost lives. It underpinned failings in preparedness within the sector and failures in immediate responses by governments. Data, and the infrastructures that produce and mediate data, are implicated in both. At the start of the pandemic for instance, the UK government did not know who was in care homes, or even where those care homes were. Moral costs and consequences follow the absence from data of people, their interests and what they value. Interventions that bring benefits to certain people or groups may be unfairly distributed, and harms can be discounted. Problems also arose in how existing data came to categorise and value some individuals and groups while neglecting others. Furthermore, the pandemic amplified existing inequalities of epistemic power – the ability to use data was conferred at times to already well-represented groups while others were made ever less visible. These problems cannot be solved through the production of more data alone. Post-pandemic plans for digital transformation must attend to the effects of such enduring issues in addition to expanding data infrastructure. In this chapter, I scrutinise some of these issues and their relationship to data through three theoretic-analytic lenses: complexities within social care systems; the human values which shape what the data measure and the decisions they inform; and the multiple scales at which data matter. I then use this framework to offer brief commentary on prospects of emerging policy promises in the sector.
COVID-19 resulted in democratic nation states worldwide implementing a state of emergency, immediately imposing restrictions on individual liberty – for instance, the freedom to live, travel and work. In many instances, restrictions were imposed without clarity about the terms, conditions and circumstances under which they would be lifted, creating concern about the long-term health of democratic states – and placing democracy itself into lockdown. Despite the evident strain placed on core democratic values and rights, policymakers, scientists and researchers also simultaneously relied on the core democratic principles of rights and responsibility to (in some instances successfully, and in other instances, unsuccessfully) generate legitimacy for their actions, encourage compliance and engender wider social support. These tensions created a crisis of confidence in the pandemic response and the institutions responsible for leading them, rather than confidence in a crisis. Policymakers needed to recognise that they were both relying on and reconstituting the ‘social contract’ at a time of crisis, with citizens as potential active co-creators of the contract, rather than simply passive citizens. Drawing from a wide range of case studies and the findings of citizen juries on good governance undertaken during the pandemic, I argue in this chapter that democratic nation states need, in future crises, to create participatory infrastructures for democracy that act as a check against the risks of concentrating executive power through the blunt instruments of emergency decision-making. Such participatory structures would act to reduce the risk that democracy itself is ‘paused’ or placed in ‘lockdown’.
In Governance, Democracy and Ethics in Crisis-decision-making, we reflect on what it means to govern ethically in a pandemic. We explore what it means to be in a situation in which rational or epistemic framings of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on data and scientific ways of knowing the world, rub up against the way people experienced the pandemic, as an unexpected, and often harmful, event in their own lives. The book brings together findings from The Pandemic and Beyond research projects linked by a focus on how decisions have been made, but looking at the pandemic from very different perspectives. In their exploration of decision-making processes from the everyday to the global, the contributors consider whether and how values have featured in decision-making, and sometimes why they have not. Exploring issues ranging from the authority of the World Health Organization and the power of data during an emergency, to the role of public engagement as a source of policy evidence, contributors consider whether (and how) the expected standards and norms of public life and decision-making should be different in times of crisis. We also reflect that the pandemic seems impossible to disentangle from matters of trust in power and authority. The answers to the questions discussed in this book will be vital in reviewing our experiences of emergency decision-making. As we emerge from the pandemic, the essential lessons drawn out in this book should direct and constrain future decision-makers in both ordinary times and extraordinary emergencies.
The home has been at the forefront of political and public health responses to, and people’s lives during, the COVID-19 pandemic. National directives in many countries to ‘stay home’, alongside border closures and other restrictions, limited local and transnational mobility to an unprecedented extent. In the UK, there were three periods of nationwide lockdown in 2020 (March‒May; November‒December) and 2021 (January‒March) where the majority of the population faced significant limitations on leaving places of residence. People experienced the impact of the universal directive to ‘stay home’ in very different ways, as explored by a growing body of research on home and everyday life during the pandemic. Across this wide-ranging and growing field of research on home and COVID-19, new forms of connection and disconnection with people and places beyond the household and the domestic dwelling have emerged as important themes. Drawing on research conducted as part of the AHRC-funded Stay Home Stories project (www.stayhomestories.co.uk), and informed by wider research on ‘home-city geographies’, this chapter explores pandemic geographies of dwelling and belonging on the domestic and neighbourhood scales for UK residents in London and Liverpool. Throughout, we argue that the home – porous and bounded, expansive and confined – is a site of pandemic dis/connection with the wider neighbourhood. Homes and neighbourhoods were formative in shaping people’s lived experiences of COVID-19 and visions for the future of both should be a central part of local and national pandemic recovery agendas.
The introduction sets the scene for the volume and the contributions within it, offering a brief outline of their historical precedent within, and contribution to, the field of arts, health and wellbeing practice. It introduces some of the key theoretical concepts underpinning work in the volume, including ideas around ‘coping’, ‘resilience’ and ‘everyday creativity’. Individual chapters are summarised and the editors reflect on the value and contribution of the research presented.
The Introduction to this book takes the reader on a journey from the COVID-19 Downing Street briefing room, with its data, graphs, diagrams and supporting cast of scientific and medical advisers, offering advice from behind their protective podium, into the everyday pandemic world. In this much messier human world, people are more than data points to be studied, counted, governed and regulated. They are experiencing the effects of the briefing room decisions in everyday pandemic lives. This is the world in which the humanities researchers whose contributions shape this book have brought their expertise to bear, aiming to bridge the gap between the briefing room and the pandemic world, and to help decision-makers do better the next time. The introduction to Governance, Democracy and Ethics in Crisis-decision-making describes how the book brings together the findings from contributors’ research projects, linked by a focus on how decisions have been made, but looking at the pandemic from very different perspectives. These perspectives have in common an interest in whether (and how) values featured in pandemic governance and decision-making, and sometimes why they did not. The Introduction’s authors conclude by asking readers of the book to consider whether the pandemic was an extra-ordinary event from which we learn systemic lessons, or, rather, whether the tone set by those in the briefing room marginalised, disabled or ignored systems and processes that were already sufficiently dynamic and flexible to have enabled a different (better?) approach.
The introduction to Knowing COVID-19 sets out the challenge of making the pandemic knowable, and situates the work of the humanities in that collective epistemological project. In the face of often quite concerted efforts to make important meanings slip away, humanities research took a proactive, immediate role in exploring complexity, cataloguing particular kinds of adversity and harm, and rendering a swiftly changing world more legible. With specific attention to the Lateral Flow Test, Cooper and Fitzgerald reflect on the humanities expertise that makes 'good' - as opposed to obscured, constrained, or partial - knowing possible, even in something so seemingly scientifically bounded as detecting the presence of the virus in saliva. They then outline the eight thematic chapters, and place them in a wider story of epistemology in the pandemic humanities.
Across the UK there are over seventy museums in writers’ homes and birthplaces open to the public. These include world class tourist destinations as well as underloved gems. All were profoundly impacted by COVID-19, in ways unique to the literary heritage sector. This chapter draws from the UKRI-AHRC Covid-19 Rapid Response project, ‘UK Literary Heritage Sites and Covid-19: Measuring Impact, Enhancing Resilience, and Learning Lessons’. It describes the efforts of heritage practitioners from the UK’s literary house sector in responding to COVID-19 and in finding new ways for the public to access English literature at a time when it was never more in demand. Lockdowns and furloughs brought many changes in our behavioural patterns, including a reconnection with the importance of nature, brought about by stringent COVID-19-related restrictions, which curtailed the time we could spend outside. Simultaneously, there was an upsurge in the public’s appetite for reading – especially of longer, more demanding literature. Seemingly, these two trends were unrelated, since reading is often an indoor pursuit. However, as this article will demonstrate, UK literary heritage sites repeatedly found creative ways to connect them, with a view to mutually enhancing the benefits of both for health and wellbeing. We have long known that nature and exercise have positive impacts on health and wellbeing, and that reading literature can too, but COVID-19 lockdowns led many writers’ house museums to seek out innovative ways of combining the benefits of both, indicating a positive direction for the literary heritage sector to take in moving on from the pandemic.
Walking Publics/Walking Arts: Walking, Wellbeing and Community during COVID-19 was an AHRC-funded research project which explored how adults across the UK experienced walking during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role that creativity played in sustaining walking activities. Employing a range of methods, from a large-scale survey to walking interviews and artist commissions, the research identified the potential of the arts to sustain, encourage and more equitably support walking during and recovering from a pandemic. Engaging with the idea of ‘just walking’ – an activity that is presumed to be simple and accessible to all, and the need to advocate for equitable access to walking activities – this essay addresses a range of barriers to participation. Drawing on research collaborations with partner organisations and artists, including Sheffield Environmental Movement and Open Clasp Theatre, we share examples of how creative walking practices can engage diverse groups of participants and engender new connections between people and place, centring the knowledge and experiences of those often excluded. The artistic work produced through creative walking practices offers insight into and wider understanding of exclusions, and routes to ‘just walking’. Acknowledging the widespread benefit of walking to physical and mental health, we stress that the invitation to walk must be located within and used as part of wider movements for tackling systemic inequalities.
Knowing COVID-19 looks at how different kinds of knowledge and meaning have been created and communicated, and the repercussions this has had – and continues to have – for how COVID-19 is managed, experienced, understood and remembered. Knowledge-making, it suggests, took various forms, and these are reflected in the diversity of chapters this volume curates. In the first instance, it demonstrates a rich humanities tradition of constructive critique, as ‘official’ communications around ‘staying home’, ‘keeping distance’, safety on buses, lateral flow testing and vaccine hesitancy are tested and interrogated. Through this collective work, we see one of the clear, indisputable values of the humanities; their attentiveness to the human, and the clarifying or reflective power this might have had with greater embeddedness in policy and information design. In the second instance – and frequently both are accomplished in the same short chapter – this volume collects a series of interventions which set out specifically to create and sustain meaning, particularly when dominant cultural narratives about the pandemic rely on those meanings slipping away from political or popular memory. Thus, we have rich and detailed explorations of the experiences of museum workers, people told to ‘stay home’, older victims of gender-based violence, people with deafblindness and racialised nurses working in the NHS; as well as extensive reflection on what it was like to make the projects which formalised this knowledge work. Taken as a whole, this volume critiques and redefines pandemic epistemologies, assembling a partial blueprint for making future crises legible.